


Oneshots by Daylight

by OpalPulsar



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gore, Hallucinations, Injury, One Shot Collection, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Temporary Character Death, usual DBD stuff, will tag as I go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-01-24 00:39:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18560410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpalPulsar/pseuds/OpalPulsar
Summary: Just a collection of all the oneshots I've written for DBD so far. Don't expect regular updates.





	1. Auditory Insanity

“Can.. can you hear me?”  
  
A pounding of the beat of a heart rang in Claudette’s ears, every nerve in her being surging with panic and adrenaline as her body screamed “ _Danger, danger, run!_ ’’. The terror radius wasn’t just a sound, it was a _feeling,_ an alarm. The now-familiar heartbeat caused Claudette’s own to surge in time, pounding to a rhythm of fear.  
  
It was hard to ignore, practically screaming in her ears, but she did it anyways, sprint falling to a stop as she froze up.  
  
It was dangerous to be in a Killer’s terror radius, this one especially. The Doctor. Claudette knew his static well, knew the way it licked up the body and through the nerves and across the spine in a fiery blaze, forcing screams from one’s throat that felt like they weren’t one’s own. She knew that well, knew that even the static that pooled around her feet was dangerous. She could feel it curling around her feet, shocking her again and again and again, slowly building madness in the way it stabbed at her nerves repeatedly. She couldn’t take much more of this. She could almost feel her sanity slipping out through her fingers.  
  
But there had been a _voice_ . She had heard it, clearly.  
  
The Doctor spoke, sometimes, a false voice caused by his electricity dancing across the neurons of whoever had already been driven insane by his static. She knew his voice, knew the way it almost _echoed_ in the mind, warped and twisted and oh, so very wrong. He liked to taunt his prey, a sadistic beast of insanity. She only heard it when she was in the very peak of madness, electricity screaming through every facet of her brain and causing her hands to shake and her focus to waver, forcing her to try to tamp her own mind’s signals down, down, trying to snap out of it and get a generator done or patch someone up.  
  
This was not his voice. His voice was inhuman, static given shape--but this was the voice of someone who was in danger, clearly hurt. She could hear it in how it trembled with fear , so human.  
  
She stood there for several minutes, kept in that one spot by the sound of it, searching, and searching harder when she heard it again.  
  
“Please… help me.”  
  
She was already half-mad from the way the Doctor’s static shrieked through the mind, snapping across neurons and twisting the mind’s impulses until his victims no longer knew the sweetness of sanity. Could you blame her for not thinking straight?  
  
She was in the middle of a Trial--what reason would there be for her to suddenly hear a voice like that?  
  
She knew it was not the Doctor’s voice--but she did not realize that auditory hallucinations were still so very much a thing.  
  
When the Doctor finally went after her and approached her with ease, several minutes of the Trial being wasted by Claudette searching fruitlessly for a voice that never existed, he laughed, loudly, a sadistic chuckle warped like a voice through a fan falling from his throat, one of the few sounds he could make with vocal cords fried by electricity.  
  
He laughed harder when Punishment dug into her back and brutalized flesh, tearing it to shreds.  
  
She ran, after the first hit, but she had wasted so much time hunting for something that didn’t exist, and she went down quickly without the presence of pallets anywhere nearby to aid her.  
  
Her screams when she was hooked for that final time--no mori, disappointingly, the Entity had not rewarded Herman with that gift of being able to kill with one’s own hands--caused the Doctor to laugh hardest of all, entertained by the way she’d been tricked by her own mind so _easily._  
  
He moved on from the scene quickly enough, spurred by the urgency of the Trial and the Entity’s whispering in his ears, leaving only a broken hook behind to show the evidence of the sequence of events that had happened, here.  
  
Soon that would be gone, too, but Claudette and Herman both would remember the incident well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The concept of the Doctor having a voice and the Doctor's weapon being named Punishment are both from Noid, who writes Herman wonderfully. Go check out his fics here, they're great.


	2. A Survivalist's Thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake sits at the campfire and thinks about things.

There was some point in time, Jake mused, sitting at the very edge of the campfire and watching the other Survivors present, that he and the other three had some sort of individual, distinguished skillset. At some point when they were first in the Entity’s realm, when they were the  _ only  _ people in the Entity’s realm, they all had their own distinct strengths, skills they could use to survive. Claudette could know where injured people were and heal them faster than anyone else. Jake didn’t make a sound no matter what state he was in, crows simply watching him break a hook instead of cawing and flying away. Dwight’s mere presence helped them do things faster, get generators done better, and he could know where the others are just as well as Claudette, if not better. Meg was fast, faster than all of them when she was well-rested, running the Killer around and springing back to an uninjured state when all the generators were done to get herself out the door.   
  
They worked well together, even despite their differing personalities. They were a team, and that didn’t change when the first new survivors started trickling into the realm.   
  
What did change, however, was that sense of individuality. The bloodweb caused it, really, but they were the ones who truly embraced it.   
  
It was a small change, at first. The bloodweb had always been sort of a.. provider, for the four of them. It’d always given them items and offerings to use in the Trials, to potentially keep themselves alive just a little longer, but the longer they stayed in the Entity’s realm and the further it let them probe into its depths while they were asleep, the more it seemed to expand. The more it seemed to  _ give.  _   
  
Then the bloodweb had given them knowledge, and little by little, they started learning each other’s skills.    
  
They didn’t even notice that they were doing so, at first. The ability transfer felt so.. natural. Jake taught Dwight how to focus his mind so he didn’t cry out when he was injured, and Dwight taught him in return how to see the others’ auras when they were close, to use their natural bond to reveal them. It was like a simple transfer of skills.    
  
They did notice, however, when they started being able to shift their own, innate abilities. Jake could give up the knowledge of breaking hooks with nothing but his hands in exchange for being able to heal wounds with herbs found in the Trial. Claudette could give up her ability to heal herself in exchange for Meg’s speed. It was unnatural, impossible anywhere but here, but they got used to it. They got used to that melding of skills, and it became almost normal for them.   
  
Sure, the other Survivors quickly gained the ability to share that kind of knowledge, too. Jake remembered shifting his ability to sabotage for Nea’s grace on her feet, the simple speed she had when sneaking through the grass, and he remembered deciding to use it regularly. He liked to be stealthy--and so did Claudette, he noticed--and her ability helped with that.    
  
But he’d also noticed that the same shifting of abilities didn’t come as naturally for the others. They called it strange, preferring to stick to their own abilities plus an additional one. He remembered it being strange for him, too, approaching a hook and realizing that he didn’t know how to do what he’d memorized so long ago at the moment. The knowledge and steps simply didn’t come. But that was so, so long ago, what felt like an eternity of Trials ago, and he used Claudette and Dwight and Meg’s skills as if they were his own, now.   
  
It was a certain loss of distinctiveness between them, but he wasn’t afraid of it. They all had their own personalities. They were still individual people, and he’d long since gotten used to using their abilities like his own.    
  
He supposed that, in the end, the other Survivors would get used to it, too. He’d already heard Nea remark about forgetting that she was able to heal herself in a Trial before--it was only a matter of time before she stopped thinking about the strangeness of being able to shift her own skills, too.    
  
He wondered, then, about the future. New survivors still appeared at the campfire, even as irregularly as they did. There were people still ending up in this place, and for all he knew, it could be like that for eternity. The number of people at the campfire would grow and grow. Would, some time in the far future--a timespan that no longer registered in his mind, as he had long stopped paying attention to how time flowed--there be dozens of Survivors at the campfire at any one time? Would the Campfire become loud, almost noisy? He glanced over to Dwight and Claudette, sitting on a log together, going through medkits and restocking them with equal skill.    
  
He remembered the quiet days when there were only four people at the Campfire at most. He remembered what it was like to not have to figure out who was in the Trial with him, because it was always the same four people. The Campfire’s quiet comfort had quickly changed to almost a sort of common space, a place where most people were if they weren’t in a Trial or scavenging in the realms away from it.    
  
Would it grow to be a loud, almost chaotic place? He thought of a faint memory of a high school cafeteria, all chaos and loud voices talking amongst and over each other. He’d never preferred loud spaces, really. He’d always tended towards quiet spots, where he could sit by himself and think. Living in the woods only reinforced that preference, as well as his preference for solitude. He enjoyed the company of Claudette or Meg or Dwight at times, sitting alone in the forest together and working on something or simply talking, but even nowadays he’d always sat at the edge of the Campfire or stayed in the forest if he could.    
  
Even as he thought of the future of a loud, chaotic Campfire, however, he thought of his closest friends and smiled softly. They’d grown so close to each other over the course of so many Trials, a bond having been formed between them that was different to their bonds between others. They’d had nobody but themselves for so long, and he trusted them entirely. He knew that even if he found himself retreating to the forest and the Fog more and more often, quietly driven away from the Campfire by the overwhelming presence of people, Claudette or Dwight or Meg would always be there to walk into the forest with him and talk for a little as they both failed to disturb the crows.   
  
They’d always been there for him, even in their early days.   
  
And as he saw the Fog coiling towards them and thickening around their feet, warning of an upcoming Trial, he stood and glanced around at the other three with that same faint smile.    
  
A Trial with all four of them. He hadn’t had that in a while.    
  
And as he considered whether he’d be okay not having the knowledge of healing himself in this Trial in exchange for seeing the others’ auras, he knew they’d continue to be there for him for their eternity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: okay this isn't going to update regularly  
> me: writes two drabbles within a day of each other
> 
> also this is completely unedited because editing is for people who actually have their life together


	3. bonecutter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nea is murdered by a Killer's hands for the first time. The Hillbilly's, to be precise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GORE WARNING. Feel free to skip this chapter!

Maybe, in a better situation, Nea would have realized that downed survivors weren’t supposed to be able to get up, realized that something was going to happen, and she would have had the chance to dread what inevitably came next.

 

As it was, all she could think of when the Hillbilly approached her, heard his awful, loping gait behind her, was that she needed to run, to get away, to save herself--and she managed to pull herself up to her knees, preparing to run, when his chainsaw began to bite through her flesh.

 

She screamed, of course. She’d been ran through with his chainsaw once before, thrown to the ground with the sheer force of the blow, a large flap of skin  _ hanging open  _ from her back, carved brutally open by the chainsaw--but that was meant to down.

 

This?

 

This 

 

was meant

 

to kill.

 

He pressed the chainsaw deeper, deeper into her back, tearing apart her muscle like fabric, the wet, mushy sound of blood and the guts that he was now just getting to evident even above the sound of the saw--and, oh, the pain, the painpainpainpain--

 

Human bodies are not meant to be torn apart. They are meant to live, to breathe. Pain is a simple signal, an alarm that something’s wrong--but, here, in the moment, it is her entire being.

 

She can’t die fast enough for the pain signals to stop coming from her brain. She has only stopped screaming because her vocal cords refuse to respond, heartbeat slowing as the saw cuts through her internal organs and turns them to slush.

 

Her mouth is open in a silent scream and although she is not crying it’s all her fading consciousness can do but register how much it hurts to be sawn in half--

 

\--and she is so unmercifully not dead yet when the blade reaches her spine, individual teeth catching on the bone even as she loses all sensation in her lower body, nerves being severed (she shouldn’t register this much but the entity likes to feast)--

 

There is a snapping sound, her entire being breaking, and she is plunged into the merciful absence of pain so abruptly, so  _ quickly  _ that when she finds herself sitting at the campfire again, she can do nothing but stare, glassy-eyed, at nothing in particular, registering that she’s not hurting anymore, her every nerve isn’t crying out anymore, she’s not dying anymore.

 

She doesn’t move, only looks out into the darkness beyond the campfire, not really registering anything, anything at all, because her mind is still catching up with the fact that she’s okay, now, that she’s not dying anymore, and then, after a few moments, she slowly, slowly, brings her knees up and her arms to her sides, and tries to work through the  _ trauma _ in her mind.

 

She can’t bring herself to move.

 

She can’t bring herself to do  _ anything. _

 

The others at the campfire wait and watch, because they, too, know what it’s like to die so violently for the first time, and they know that she’s not going to be okay.

 

Not for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Quick note that my Tumblr's at opalescent-writing if you wanna check me out there! I crosspost all of my shorter oneshots there.


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